The Hollowing

The hum remained.
It did not fade with sleep or wakefulness. It thrummed in his bones like marrow had turned to tuning forks, vibrating him from the inside out. The sound carried no melody, no rhythm just an endless vibration that seemed to strip him, cell by cell, of all resistance.
For days or what passed for them he felt himself emptying.
It began with small things. His hunger. His thirst. The natural pull of his body’s needs dulled until he could ignore them with ease. Then his fears once so sharp softened into vague impressions, like shadows cast by dying light.
Even his memories began to thin, as though someone had taken a sponge and pressed it against the canvas of his mind, soaking up the colors, leaving behind faded outlines.
When he tried to recall his mother’s face, he could only summon the idea of warmth, not the features. When he tried to hear his father’s voice, only silence filled the gap.
But the silence no longer frightened him. It felt like inheritance.
He spoke less. He breathed less. Sometimes he thought he might not be breathing at all.
In the mirror, he barely recognized the figure staring back.
His skin had grown translucent. Veins like fine threads of shadow spread beneath, though they pulsed not with blood but something darker, slower. His eyes sank deep into their sockets, ringed with bruises of sleeplessness, but the irises themselves seemed lighter nearly white.
When he blinked, the reflection did not always follow.
The world outside the apartment no longer beckoned.
He pressed his ear to the door once, out of curiosity.
The hum vibrated louder there, an entire ocean waiting beyond, vast and patient. He imagined if he opened the door, he would be swept away into that sound not falling, not drowning, but dispersing, dissolving into a greater whole.
The thought should have terrified him.
Instead, it thrilled him.
One evening though time had lost its shape he sat cross-legged in the center of the room.
He closed his eyes and listened.
The silence wrapped around him like a cocoon, and he felt himself stretching, extending beyond his body. His thoughts were no longer confined to his skull. They drifted outward, pressed against the walls, seeped into the floorboards.
He could feel the apartment breathe with him.
The shadows along the walls shifted in rhythm to his pulse no, not his pulse anymore. The hum’s pulse.
And for the first time, he realized he was not hollowing out.
He was being remade.
Sleep brought visions.
He saw himself walking corridors without end, doors on either side opening to rooms filled with versions of himself some screaming, some smiling, some sitting in silence. Each figure looked up as he passed, their eyes pale and vacant, their mouths stitched closed with invisible thread.
They were not separate from him. They were echoes, fragments left behind like shells.
He walked past them all without fear.
At the end of the corridor, he found a door unlike the rest. Its frame pulsed with light, faint and steady, as though the hum itself had solidified into a doorway.
He reached out.
But before his hand touched it, he woke and the door lingered in his mind, glowing faintly even in waking hours.
He no longer felt alone.
That was the strangest part. For months, solitude had been both his refuge and his torment. But now he sensed presences in the silence not intruders, not strangers, but companions.
They did not speak. They did not need to. Their awareness brushed against his like silk threads, weaving him into a tapestry larger than himself.
When he moved, he felt them move with him.
When he breathed, he felt them draw air too.
And when he closed his eyes, he swore he could hear their heartbeats, layered beneath the hum, slow and steady and endless.
The mirror no longer frightened him either.
When he finally gathered the courage to face it, he saw not the indifferent reflection but something else a version of himself already further along, already emptied, already remade.
The figure in the glass lifted its hand in greeting.
He lifted his own in return.
Their palms pressed against the surface, and for a fleeting moment, the boundary dissolved.
He felt the cold of the glass melt into warmth, as though the reflection’s flesh met his.
And then it whispered not with sound, but directly into his skull:
“Almost.”
He laughed then. A raw, cracked laugh that startled even him.
Almost.
Yes. He was almost there.
Almost hollow. Almost remade. Almost gone.
And for the first time since the silence had claimed him, he felt joy.